


Pause; Rewind

by elle_stone



Series: Press Play [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe Season 3, Angst, Former Nathan Miller/Bryan, Gen, Introspection, M/M, Minor Jasper Jordan/Nathan Miller, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 04:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12449817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Monty steps out of the tree line first, Bryan a step behind him, and together they tilt their heads back and take in the dropship, sitting there solid and tall, like a strange, unsettling monument in the otherwise undisturbed green. Even to Monty, it looks out of place. The other signs of camp have long been eradicated from the earth, but the dropship itself is immovable. Eternal. Left alone now without context and without history, abandoned, alien, it will watch over their little clearing long after every last one of the final sky-born generation is dead.Monty and Bryan take a trip to the former dropship camp; Monty reminisces about the past and considers an alternate life not lived.





	Pause; Rewind

**Author's Note:**

> This story is in the same universe as/is a sequel to my fic [Press Play](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7333528), but it isn't necessary to read one story to understand the other. Everything is pretty much the same up through 3x04, at least in terms of major events: Farm Station's return, Jasper and Monty's fight, etc. Miller and Bryan have broken up, and Jasper and Miller are (semi-) together. That's really all you need to know, because the focus here is primarily on Monty.

Monty’s earliest memory is of the fields. He’s perched up on his father’s shoulders, unbelievably tall, swaying under the bright circadians and breathing in the deep-dusky smell of the dirt. And in front of him is row upon row of green.  

Sometimes even now he takes that memory out and plays it around in his mind. He gives it context and contour. He defines it by everything that came after, layers it with the associations of an entire childhood and a stunted adolescence.  

He remembers what his mother told him once, years later, that the herbs were for the people on the Ark who were sick and not going to get better; how everyone needed to eat, but no one wanted to need what the Greens were growing. He remembers how he realized, later, that there was a kernel of falsehood in that general truth. No one wanted to _need_ those plants, but everyone wanted to try them. 

And he calls up, too, the first time he himself breathed them in, the first time he felt his whole body suffused with soil and water and sun and green, when he held the smoke in his mouth and his lungs. He remembers being told that this high was the closest you could get to Earth, and he thinks about how for a while this was marvelously true. How, that first night, he held the whole planet in his hands. 

But when he was small he didn’t know any of this. He didn’t know anything at all. Impressions and experiences flitted into and out of his mind with graceful and soothing impermanence, and the very first one to stick, to burrow right deep in, was the glow of bright sharp color as natural as the Earth itself, unfolding in infinite waves in front of him, as far as his small eyes could see.  

* 

Bryan and a couple other boys from Farm have taken it upon themselves to look after the armory: rearranging the guns and bullets and gunpowder; taking inventory; practicing, sometimes, how to shoot. Monty's not sure what the point of all that is. None of them is going to be recruited into the Guard, not unless Pike wins the next election. Although, given the mood in camp recently, he can’t be sure that won’t happen after all. 

So maybe they have the right idea. 

On the Ark, not a lot of people from Farm went into the Guard. It was an insular station. Its people grew up with the dirt, got used to it under their nails, got used to the melody of the hydro-generator hum and the chemical stains on their fingers and the vaulting ceilings over the fields. And they never wanted to leave. But that's an old life, a dead-and-gone time, and the real reason Bryan and his friends aren't wearing the uniform is because Abby Griffin and Marcus Kane run things now and they don't trust the new survivors, not enough. Monty sees their unease with a clear-eyed and simple understanding, no judgement or rancor to it, which is made crystal-sharp by the way he and his mother stare at each across the table on the nights they eat together, like they're each wondering _what happened to you?_ in the way back of their minds.  

If he'd just put the fucking plants back like he was supposed to, he would have been on his home station when it launched itself down to the ground. He would have taken his final journey with his parents on either side of him and he would have landed in Ice Nation and his first step on Earth would have been into the snow. He cannot imagine the cold. He tries, sometimes—never tries to imagine the warriors in their skull masks and thick boots or lets himself wonder what weapons they used, when they mowed down his neighbors' kids or when they took his father's life. But he does try to conjure up that chill blowing wind and the flurrying white snowflakes that caught in his mother's hair, and sometimes he's so good at it, he feels real goosebumps creeping up his skin. 

Sometimes Bryan tries to talk to him, as if they have something in common. Which they don't. And Monty hates small talk so the conversations never last long, but he can’t help playing it around in his mind sometimes. What if they did? What if he told him: _stay_ , and _let me ask you something_? And what if the question that bubbled up first _was tell me how my father died_? Or _tell me what happened to his body_? Or _tell me what I would be like, if I hadn't forgotten to put those stupid plants back from where we took them, all those months ago, like an utter fool_? 

* 

Monroe's set up a card game that meets every few nights in the commons, an informal low-stakes poker game that turns into a drinking game more nights than not. It's mostly for the trainee guards Bellamy's been working with, which is to say a lot of gunners from the dropship plus a few younger Mecha and Alpha kids who probably never thought, a year ago, that they'd ever get to touch a real-life weapon. But they invite Monty to play too. The cards are dog-eared and some of them have started to rip. Playing with them requires a sort of care, a consideration for what time has started to destroy, that sits poorly with the often raucous atmosphere of the game itself. He mostly listens because he's not here to get drunk or to make jokes but just to pass the time. To have something to do. Evenings are long in Arkadia. 

Tonight he's sitting at the end of the table, Harper to his right, Peter Colton to his left, watching as Monroe deals and the cards slide furiously across the gray metal tabletop. They form little misshapen piles in front of the players. The commons is quiet tonight, even their game fairly subdued, so it's easy to pick out all the little disturbances that unsettle the air. Like the conversation that verges on a fight, voices just a little bit too loud for simple disagreement; or the particularly funny joke, as someone's laughter rings out from near the bar. And when he hears an unexpected clang, like metal ringing, he can't help but look up at that, too. Most of his table does. When the others see what it was, they turn away and start picking up and looking at their cards, and it's only Monty who narrows his eyes and keeps watching. 

Miller and Jasper are sitting at the table nearest the bar, arm wrestling. This is an exercise in futility. Partially because Miller always wins those things but mostly because Jasper's never arm wrestled anyone in his life and there is no way he’d be good at it. His arms look stupidly skinny. Worse than they used to, even, since he’s been losing weight. Yet still he wraps his fingers around Miller's hand, palm pressed up against palm, and plants his elbow on the table, and stares at Miller with that serious face that isn't serious at all, that face Monty used to know so well, and they try another round. This one goes on for a while. Miller easing up on him, probably. Just letting their arms sway, fingertips digging into skin.  

Monty watches until Miller slams the back of Jasper's hand against the tabletop again and then he tells Harper he'll back for the next hand but he's sitting this one out, and he goes to get a drink. 

There's no one bartending tonight, but Bryan's behind the counter, pouring himself a cup of moonshine that's nothing like what Monty used to make. But it's something. He offers a mug to Monty too and he nods, pulling himself up on onto one of the stools. His back is to Miller and Jasper but he hears another bang of fist to metal and then Jasper's wide and loud "Ah-ha" and a clap of hands that makes his jaw clench. 

"He must really like him," Bryan says, as he takes the stool next to Monty's. "To let him win. Nate hates letting people win." 

"Maybe he's just gotten bored of the same outcome over and over," Monty answers. He's not sure why he's talking but he doesn't want to bring his drink back to the poker game. He doesn't want to pass by Jasper's table either, on his way to anywhere else. His words sound bitter and sandpaper rough but Bryan doesn’t seem to mind. 

"Nate never gets bored of winning."  

This is almost the longest conversation they've ever had on Earth. Rather than let it die out, like it wants to, Monty hums: a placeholder, to keep it going.  

"It's just an excuse for them to touch," Bryan adds. 

Monty rolls his eyes. "I think they have plenty of other excuses for that." 

"Not in public they don’t." 

This is true. Monty's pretty sure that he and Bryan are the only ones who know what Miller and Jasper are. Or approximately what they are. The exact contours of the relationship, its definitions and rules, remain mysterious. They aren't demonstrative in public and sometimes days go by without Monty seeing them together—which doesn't mean they're not together, even though Arkadia is small and people are hard to lose track of. But the last time he went knocking on Jasper's bedroom door there wasn't any answer, even though he kept knocking for so long that even that stubborn asshole would have said something eventually, and even though it was late at night, when just about everyone else in Arkadia was holed up in their own rooms, asleep. 

Those two could do almost anything they wanted in public and no one would care, so either they don't want the questions and the gossip, or they're trying to spare Bryan's feelings. Monty doesn't float either possibility aloud. 

He's about to say something about the poor quality of the booze instead when Bryan asks him, "When's the last time you left Arkadia?" and he looks up, brow furrowed, ugly backwater taste of alcohol forgotten on his tongue. 

"Last week, I guess," he answers slowly. "On one of Bellamy's scouting missions." 

"I haven't been out in even longer," Bryan says. "If you don't have an in with someone important, you might as well be a prisoner in here." 

"That's what lockdown means, yeah," Monty reminds him. He tries not to let any surprise show in his face at the thought that Bellamy might be somebody _important_. It's just too weird to think about. It's weird to see himself, and this group he was thrown into by the oddest collections of chance, as they might look from the outside, to almost-strangers. 

If Bryan hears the uptick of judgement, that eternal frustrated sarcasm, in his voice, he just ignores it. His thumb is sliding back and forth along the side of his mug and he’s watching Monty with a patient, slightly curious eye, like there are words on the tip of his tongue, words he wants Monty to hear but they’ll both have to wait for just the right number of seconds to tick by first. Monty stares down into his own drink. It’s easier, that way, to pretend he is not being stared at in turn. 

“We’re on the ground,” Bryan says. The words come out slowly and are gently formed. “In our own settlement, you know, and it took us all long enough to get here. No one on the Ark thought people would see the Earth again for generations yet but here we are.”  

He should probably sound awed. By all the rules of logic and cool, reliable common sense, he should be speaking with a voice shot through with an amazement so clear it almost shades to disbelief. Because how can they walk on the real ancient dirt, the natural dirt, and breathe real air from the trees, and feel the distant rays of the sun, and not be awed? Why does their sense of wonder, a faraway voice asks somewhere in the back of Monty’s thoughts, feel so muffled? When was it smothered, when was the flame of it put out? 

Mostly Bryan just sounds like he’s trying to work out an old, troubling problem by finally giving it voice. 

“But sometimes, most of the time, in here, I feel like it’s not too different from just rounding us all up and shoving us into Alpha Station. Like that’s basically,” he’s saying, “what they did.” 

That is not a fair assessment, because Alpha Station floated free above the Earth, and not even their elite knew the crunch of pebbles underneath their boot soles or what the tendrils of plants look like, poking up in unexpected places, or ever felt the noonday heat or the chill of morning dew. And he and Bryan are inside now but they can step out without space suits and walk over to one of the shoddily erected scrap-metal buildings, or up to the scrap-metal fence that rings them in. Such small freedoms were unheard of luxuries in space. And if this were a debate, Monty would say so. But he just hums, as if he were barely listening.  

“Like we’re all stuck in Alpha,” Bryan continues. And, after a beat, tilting his head, “Or Prison Station.” 

“You don’t know shit about Prison Station.” 

He couldn’t be more surprised at the sharp, angry words from his own mouth if they were the sharp, angry pieces of a mug he’d crushed without warning with his own bare hand. His mug is intact but his fingers hurt where they’re gripping it too hard, and he feels in his own expression an ugly combination of insult and disbelief. It’s only a small consolation to think that he didn’t shout the words. That at least no one else has heard them. A part of him wants to get up and walk away but he doesn’t know who’s watching him so he only sets his jaw, forces his hands to relax and then fall down to his lap. 

Bryan just stares at him, unfazed. His expression is so neutral, Monty wonders if he was waiting for exactly this: for a small explosion so his calm voice can fill the intervening void. “I know that,” he says. “That’s why I’m—” He breathes out an audible, hard breath through his nostrils and leans in a little closer. His voice drops low. He doesn’t sound like he’s sharing a secret, more like he’s asking for discretion. “That’s what I’m asking you.” 

Monty doesn’t know what that means, only that his shoulders want to hunch up to his ears and his hands and feet want to fidget. He looks away while he’s trying to think.  

“Why me?” he asks. 

“Because you’re Farm Station.” 

Even without looking, Monty can imagine the way Bryan’s shoulders roll back as he speaks, the way he sits up a little straighter, like boys who play at being Guardsmen do.  

“You didn’t come down with us but you’re still Farm. That matters. Probably matters more now than it used to even on the Ark. I know I can trust you to tell me about—about how it was. You know?” 

He does, now; he understands. He breathes out and the last bits of resentment leave his lungs, rests his forearms on the table and presses his thumb against the table edge and the last smudges of rancor disappear. This is what Bryan means. That he doesn’t know what true lock-up is like but he wants to. That he doesn’t know what happened to the hundred on Earth but he wants to. That he needs to know what’s made Monty—someone else formed, just like him, from artificial, profane, soil—so different, so incomprehensible, so distant. What’s made the rest of them so unfathomable and hard to reach. 

Monty picks up his mug again and drinks as much as he can stand, so that his throat burns and his eyes close tight, until there’s only a shallow pool of bitter liquid left. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asks. He means this as the smallest concession only, carrying no promise of reply. 

“It’s more…” Bryan taps his fingers against the bar, twice, hard and fast like he wants to make it hurt. “It’s more what I want you to show me.” 

When Monty flicks his gaze to the side, he sees that Bryan is staring at him. And he wonders if Bryan is aware, like he himself is aware, of all the people around them, the background hum of noise they make, the conversations, the movement of feet, the card game, the other games, the distractions. He wants to say, _it’s different out in the woods_ , and then, _maybe you already know that_. He wants to say, _yes, but you have to do something for me_. He wants to turn around, just long enough to glance over his shoulder, to know if he’s the object of someone else’s gaze, except he’s not sure if it would hurt worse to know that he is or that he’s not.  

Amid all these instincts, mixed up as they are with a naïve surprise and an old man’s recoil, whatever the right answer should be gets too easily lost. But he knows an ex-prisoner doesn’t hide behind rules and that desperate, hardened, hollow people don’t care about risk except to seize it, so he dredges up a few words, a few syllables that sound like his insides feel. “I know a way out,” he says. “Meet me back here tomorrow morning, and I’ll show you.” 

Bryan smiles, an expression of trustworthy white teeth. For a second, the moment feels like it’s come from another time, in an alternate life. “All right,” he answers. “I’ll be here.” 

* 

Miller’s in the Guard and he knows about the gate, but still Monty doesn’t suspect for a second that it will be closed. And he’s right. Bryan keeps lookout while he shoves back the rusted piece of metal and darts out. When they’re both safely outside, it’s Monty who pulls the makeshift door back down again. It sticks a little, then rushes down without warning, almost catching his fingers as it crashes into place. 

He stares at his fingertips, searching out blood from the scrape of rust against skin. 

“You okay?” Bryan asks. 

Monty looks up, startled, because for a moment he’d forgotten that he wasn’t alone. “Yeah,” he answers. “I’m fine.” 

It’s a long walk to the dropship, but the day is sunny and warm with waxing spring, the slightest of breezes occasionally rustling the leaves. Before Arkadia is even out of sight behind them the air becomes easier to breathe. That isn’t a logical thought. But somehow without the leaning shacks and the towering gray wall and the Guards all in black patrolling, without the people in their patched-up clothes, outside the claustrophobia of Alpha Station, his lungs expand farther and his head feels clearer; even his senses of sight and smell and hearing seem to have become more acute. 

“This is what I imagined Earth would be like,” Bryan says, as they step past the tree line and into the cooler, darker safety of the woods. “Warm, and green everywhere.” The sun filters imperfectly through the leaves, forms patterns of brightness and shade around their feet. “How did you picture it, back on the Ark?” 

He doesn’t have to ask _if_ Monty pictured it, because everyone did. Everyone had his own fantasy about what their home planet, that magical and mythical and sacred place they’d never seen, might have been like before their ancestors razed it to the ground. Still it’s an impossible question to answer because he imagined a hundred different Earths, and each one was as beautifully real and perfectly formed in his mind as the last. He’d never known creativity in anything else. He’d taken comfort only in numbers and wires and code: those things that could be known with hard, deliberate certainty. But Earth was a constantly shifting, changing, mutating variable dream that he, that they, spun out in all its iterations, over and over, without tiring, without end. On what planet would you rather go for a swim. On what planet would you rather climb a mountain. On what planet would you rather plant a garden. On what planet would you rather go on a date. On what planet would you rather make a snow fort. On what planet would you rather catch children in the rye. On what planet would you rather go camping. Forests, mountains, snowscapes, deserts, they were all EARTH to him once. He can’t remember anymore which came first or which burned brightest in his mind. 

Now when he thinks of Earth he thinks of the forest. He thinks of the sight that greeted him from the doorway of the dropship, where he stood for one long moment before he jumped down to the ground. He and Jasper were in the upper level seats—the cheap seats, he'd joked, not even really seats, strapped to the wall of an old rusty piece of tin, hurtling through space hoping they wouldn't die, some small and quiet part of them sure they would die—which meant they were in the back of the crowd when the doors opened. At first, he could only see the backs of the other prisoners' heads and a long, clear shaft of light. Tiny dust motes floated in it. It picked up the highlights in people's hair, turned the dark gray of the dropship walls, in some places, almost white, and he just stared at it, at this light appearing like a physical, tangible thing. Light like nothing on the Ark could produce, not even the floodlights over the Farm Station fields.  

Jasper, taller than him and standing on his toes, was the first to tell him: "There are _trees_. It's so green, Monty. It's so green." Full of uncontrollable energy as always, he’d been bouncing a little on his feet. 

After a moment of shocked silence, the others began to spill out. They were yelling and laughing and crying out to the sky, waiting for the echo of their own voices that never came, and as the crowd dispersed ahead of them, he and Jasper reached the entranceway at last. Jasper took an unhesitating leap off into the dirt. But Monty, for a moment, just stood. He took a big breath of the air. He wasn't afraid. If the air had been radioactive it would have killed them already; he'd be standing on the edge of a field of dead bodies, his own skin already popping and breaking with red scars. But they were fine. They were alive, and being alive had never quite meant _this_ before. Fifteen years of stale, recycled air and he'd never learned to breathe the scent of flowers or trees or mud or bark or sunlight. Fifteen years of cramped, closed quarters and he'd never learned to scan a horizon so achingly beyond reach.  

It wasn't until Jasper turned around and waved to him, called to him, that he jumped, too. Bent his knees and launched himself onto the ground. Felt the soft dirt squash under his soles and then, beneath it, the hardness of the Earth itself, the steady certainty of home. 

He hadn't expected it to feel like that at all. He hadn't expected the almost imperceptible slide of soft brown dirt, or the heady rush of unfamiliar air making him dizzy. He hadn't expected an assault of the senses so complete he had to reach back and grab for the side of the ship, to steady himself until he found his balance again. 

“I guess I thought it would be something like this,” he says, because he doesn’t want to try to explain. 

"Yeah." Bryan pushes back an overhanging tree branch and ducks under it, but even as he does, his eyes are tilted up to the clear blue sky. "It's beautiful around here, especially when you get into the woods. Was it—was this what you saw when you first came down? Was this your first view of Earth?" 

For a second, Monty's back goes stiff, and he wonders with a brief flash of irrational fear if Bryan was somehow reading his mind, or if he'd been saying his thoughts aloud without noticing. But then he realizes, no, Bryan's asking about those early days because they're on his mind, too. That's why they're out here in the first place. That’s what this journey’s all about. 

"The dropship landed in a clearing," he answers. "But yeah, we were surrounded by the woods." 

"Nice weather?" 

Beautiful weather, what he thinks now must have been the last burst of summer before the early frosts of fall. For all he knew at the time, though, Earth weather was always like that. Skidding white wisps of clouds in a blue-white sky; the crunch of branches under foot; the steady solid trunks of trees rising up to the sun and solid snake-like roots rising up from the soil, forming intricate patterns in the dirt; plants and flowers and leaves everywhere. 

"I think Monroe said that it rained the first night," he says. "At the dropship."  

Bryan gives him a confused look, and he adds, "I wasn't there. Some of us went out looking for—to look around." He steps up onto a particularly big root, then back down. After that first day, he never did much exploring, but still he's pretty sure he remembers the path back to the old camp, and it's not too much farther, now, from here.  

"Like a scouting mission," Bryan says. "Makes sense." 

Monty considers telling him that Miller didn't go, that he was back at the campsite feeling the rain drench through his clothes and chill through to his skin, but he doesn't. He's not ready, yet, to bring up the unspoken.  

For a while, Bryan doesn't ask any more questions, and Monty holds back the words that well up in his own throat. He leads them up a small incline, not quite a hill, over a fallen tree, then through some old leaves, and he wonders what Earth looked like from the doorway of Farm Station after it crashed. Did it land on its side, a crumpled, mangled mess in the snow? Did they have to crawl their way up through the wreckage of their old rooms, force open a door, shove their shoulders against metal stuck against metal until a panel popped open and let in the wind and the snow? Who was the first person to jump down into the drifts and survey those craggy gray mountains in the distance and those shifting white snow dunes at their feet? Was there a moment of fear, before the elation of homecoming set in? How long did it take the children to start running through the snow, kicking it up with their feet, sifting it through their hands, forming it into snow men, sketching snow angels in the once-unbroken white? 

Did his parents watch them fondly? How would a fond look sit on their faces, which he remembers nearly always as serious and stern? 

He doesn't say any of this but he gets so lost in the thoughts that he almost forgets to turn them right when they need to go right. Then he has to stumble back past a clump of sumac bushes to get back to the bit of dirt he was looking for: what they can both see now is a narrow, wobbly path, created fairly recently by the trampling of an unknown number of feet. Bryan looks briefly concerned, like he's wondering if Monty isn't so trustworthy after all, but his face relaxes when he sees they've found a trail.  

"Was this always here?" he asks. "Or did—” 

"We made it," Monty answers. "This was the path we used whenever anyone had to leave camp. You'll see it soon, the clearing's just beyond those trees." 

And so it is. Monty steps out of the tree line first, Bryan a step behind him, and together they tilt their heads back and take in the dropship, sitting there solid and tall, like a strange, unsettling monument in the otherwise undisturbed green. Even to Monty, it looks out of place. The other signs of camp have long been eradicated from the earth. Their tents, the dropship seats they'd dragged outside, the campfire they'd built up every night and the logs they'd pulled in around it as seats, the big bins they'd set up to sort through berries and nuts and mushrooms, the shaky wooden structure they'd built to store their meat, even the wall they'd run themselves into exhaustion to build—gone. Gone as if they'd never been. What the Grounders didn't destroy and scavengers didn't pillage, Arkadia itself has come back and taken. No scrap of cloth or old junky piece of plastic too small or too insignificant to put to some good use.  

But the dropship itself is immovable. Eternal. Left alone now without context and without history, abandoned, alien, it will watch over their little clearing long after every last one of the final sky-born generation is dead. An oddity for future generations to tell tales of, maybe, or maybe just to forget. And he cannot help wondering if that will happen. If they will forget. He imagines someone finding the clearing again, long after the trail that leads to it has disappeared, and peering up at this scarred block of metal and wondering how it came to sit in this quiet, tranquil circle of grass. Perhaps it will be a discovery for the ages, the start of conspiracy theories and myths. 

A kid like Jasper used to be would have a million explanations, enough to spark a strange tale or two in a kid like Monty's head, and they'd trade their stories over moonshine or earth-grown weed, late at night when all the decent grown-up people are asleep. 

An odd feeling passes over him, like being out of his body, viewing himself and his life through the long lens of history, and it so unsettles him that he takes off with long strides across the fresh new grass toward the ship. Bryan is slow to follow him, and has to jog just to catch up. 

It should be Bryan leading the way. This is his trip, after all, something he wanted or needed to do. His adventure, or pilgrimage. Although Monty can't begin to guess what he hopes to learn from the old ship or the way nature has already started to claim what once, for a brief moment, was theirs. 

His, really. Never Bryan's, which is maybe why at first he stares around the clearing with such fascination, as if trying to conjure the apparitions that appear to Monty on their own. Tents secured into the Earth, tilting when a strong wind blows. Waking up to a blast of sun and the distant hints of forest sounds. Lighting a fire when darkness falls, watching bright sparks flash as thin branches snap and drop into the flame. 

Maybe he is filling the space with every Earth fantasy he had up on the Ark. Maybe he's remembering whatever Miller told him. Except that, knowing Miller, that probably wasn't very much. 

"There's not much here," Bryan says and then, quick, as if the observation were an insult requiring apology, "I just mean—you guys really did a good job of clearing this camp. It looks like no one ever lived here at all." 

Monty almost says he didn’t have anything to do with that, but then he realizes Bryan means _you_ as in _your people_ , as in _Arkadia_ , _before Farm Station came_. So much for station loyalty.  

He just shrugs, his shoulders shoved up against his ears, and sticks his hands in his pockets because he doesn't know what else to do. If he'd been asked—if he hadn't been, probably, in Mount Weather at the time—he would have come with them and torn it all down. He wouldn't have felt bad about it, because it was what needed to be done. But afterwards it would have ached, low and throbbing, like a stubbed toe, like it aches now, and to hold that sensation back and staunch the ugly flow of silence, he gestures to a spot at the back of the camp, near the trees, and says, "Miller's tent was over there. He shared it with Monroe and Sterling." 

Bryan glares at him, offended that Monty would assume he cares about where Miller lived or what he did, even though he obviously does. 

Monty adds, "In case you were wondering," lightly, and offers no apology. 

"I wasn't," Bryan lies, and color rises to his cheeks and he jerks his gaze down to his boots. He sticks his hands in his pockets. Monty doesn't press and after a few moments he asks, "Monroe and Sterling?" 

Monty nods. "Sterling didn't make it," he says. He's not sure why. He didn't know the guy well, has no reason to think Bryan did either, but it just comes to him, this piece of information: that Miller's old tentmate was one of the lost.  

But now that he's said it, he wants to keep talking. He hates that particular thick silence that ghosts always bring. "I was in a tent over there, at first." He points to a spot near the middle of camp, where he can almost see, like a memory overlaid directly, faintly, over his vision, the outline of that tiny little scrap of a tent where he and Jasper spent their first days on the ground. "Then near here, in a different tent, later."  

Bryan looks up again at that, honestly curious. "Did people move around a lot?" 

"No. Not usually." Now he's the one who feels that awkward regret, like he's said too much, or the wrong thing. "It was a special circumstance."  

Jasper Jordan, folk hero. 

He doesn't want to talk about it, or think about it. 

And luckily Bryan doesn't ask. 

So Monty just keeps talking. He points out where the fire pit used to be, where they sorted their food, where they built the wall. He paces across the clearing in long, looping steps, gesturing vaguely, barely ever looking back to see if Bryan is following him, or listening. His words sound like someone else's words said in someone else's voice.  

He does not say, _and here is where Jasper and I made our fire_ , or _and here is where he fell asleep drunk on the grass_ , or _and here is where he spilled Finn's ashes, and here is where we fought_. But he is careful never to step on where Finn's ashes must still be. 

When he has nothing more to say he circles back to the dropship and he looks at the ground, and then at the trees, at the boundaries of the clearing that may one day, far in the future, all be forest again, and then he looks at Bryan, who is staring up toward the sky. Like he's measuring the dropship's height. He hasn't said anything in a long while and Monty doesn't quite know how to read his silence.  

"I can almost picture it," he says finally. His voice is wistful and far away. It occurs to Monty that Bryan has been trying for a long while now, for months, to imagine it all: what must have happened to Miller after the ship launched and, if he made it, how he was surviving, where he slept, what he ate, what he did. Every detail. Almost no one was told about the launch. The prisoners were rousted from their cells in the middle of the day and shoved into vague, unruly lines, and marched through the prison station halls and told nothing. Said goodbye to no one. Got one last look at no one. Monty doesn't even know how long it took for the rest of the Ark to get word of the mission. He imagines not very long, because word travels fast in a community that small, but he doesn't actually know. 

He's spent a long time, too, trying to imagine the impossible, the too distant, the too vague, trying to sketch in details of a life never lived, so he has some sympathy. He sees the lost, aching look on Bryan's face and knows what it feels like on the inside. But he doesn't have words to match the empathy. 

Finally, Bryan jerks his chin down, an awkward, forced movement, and motions back sharply with his shoulder, toward the ship. "Do you think we can get that door open?" 

Monty follows his gesture, looking behind him at the monolith looming. 

The last time he was at the dropship site, it looked just like this, but before that, before Mount Weather, it was bustling with activity and noise and the ship's door was always open, only a tattered windblown flag over the entrance to give the inside any privacy. Jasper told him about closing the door. He told him about the ring of fire, the scent of charred flesh when they stepped outside again and the unrecognizable black bones that marked out the number of dead. _Enough to make you want to hurl. So much smoke, I didn't even notice at first, that they'd come—_

The door is closed again now and as Monty passes his hand over it, over the scorch mark distortions, the jagged black over the gray, he wonders who decided to box this old thing up again. The lever that opens and closes the door is on the inside. It was never intended to be launched unmanned. But it must have looked too raw, its open mouth too gaping, and whoever led the last scavenging team must have decided it was better to leave no bit of business undone. Like locking up the door to your old quarters when you move somewhere new, erasing your old password, scouring the memory of yourself from the entrance lock code. 

If someone locked the dropship from the outside, they can pull down the door again from the outside too, so he nods. "Yeah. We can. You want to see the inside?" 

Bryan shrugs, though he’s obviously more curious than he lets on. "Like I said," he answers, "not much to see out here." 

Whoever closed the dropship up probably used an emergency release mechanism to do it, Monty figures, so he leads Bryan around to the back of the ship and starts searching out a panel that looks promising. He figures it won’t be too obvious which one it is. Age and damage have worn off most of the ship’s original markings, and what remains are mostly the scars of graffiti and messages carved into the metal with knives. (Bryan stops to run his hand over _First son first to dye_ and Monty closes his eyes for a moment and sees Wells and then, too fast to stop the string of associations that try to rush him, Clarke, as she used to look, bright-faced and stern in the sun.) But he has enough training to know what he’s looking for. The panel is square and slightly unevenly placed, like someone was fiddling behind it not too long ago, then shoved it back into place at the last minute. Bryan helps him pry it off. Behind is a series of buttons, their labels also faint by now with time, but Monty figures the big red one is a safe bet. 

He presses it, holds it down, and the dropship door descends with a slow creak. 

Bryan watches it, fascinated, and Monty watches him, more than the door, trying to feel what he’s feeling. He tries to remember if the ship made this sound when they first landed. But he can't recall. Some of his memories are dagger sharp and as close as last night's dreams; others are hazy and won't be dragged up to the surface, no matter what effort he puts to the task. The only noises he remembers are stomping feet, metal clanging beneath boot soles, and a faraway whooshing sound like competing forces of gas meeting, the too-hot steam of an ancient old spaceship forcing back the pristine forest air. He remembers being startled by the silence, first, and then by an obscenity of noise as one hundred people clambered to the exit. 

Bryan seems hesitant to actually enter the ship, but Monty didn't come all this way for nothing, so he pushes past him and walks up the gangplank with the confidence of someone returning home. Bryan's steps follow quickly behind him.  

The sight that greets them is nothing but gray space metal and shadows, approaching silver only within the rectangular shaft of late morning light that comes in through the door. Still, they both stop for a moment when they enter, Bryan assaulted by the unreal newness of the space, and Monty by another wave of memories. 

The inside of the ship has been scavenged just like the clearing: Clarke's medical supplies, the extra food and weapons, the chairs, the makeshift hammocks, all gone—even the cloth that marked the entranceway has been torn down. Monty sees all of these relics anyway. Memories flicker in and out of focus, existing and not existing all at once as he takes in the dark, cramped ground floor. Monty can't imagine what interest all this emptiness holds for Bryan, but still he stands in the doorway just staring like it is the most fascinating thing he's ever seen. 

He starts walking forward slowly, each footfall clanging down, disrupting the silence, overpowering the beat of Monty's heart in his own ears. 

"Nate's dad," Bryan says, after a few moments spent searching out other people's ghosts, "he, uh—he told me you had audio and visual from here, for a while." 

"For a couple of days," Monty answers, shrugging. He doesn't want to think about it. They used the channel to speak to their families, other loved ones sometimes, but no one got more than a few minutes. A lot of them had talked about seeing each other again soon. He can't remember if his parents said anything like that. Probably. Maybe. The memory is hazy with what he recognizes now as the sneaking onset of an unexpectedly strong high: how his father's face had seemed oddly discolored, as if by bad reception, how the image had jumped with an uncertainty located, not in the physical, but somewhere within his own mind. He'd probably seemed unfocused to them, too, distant and floating. Not for the first time. But it's not what he wanted his dad's last memory of him to be. 

"Did you get to speak to Miller?" he asks, since Bryan seems to want to talk. 

He shakes his head. "No. Wasn’t family." He's reached the ladder leading up to the second floor, and he knocks his knuckles against it absently, like he's testing if the metal will hold. "I think he only spoke to his dad for, like, two minutes anyway. He—said Nate had been talking on video all day—” Bryan's brow furrows, trying to get the memory right. It comes back to him only in scraps, was formed at the beginning only in scraps; it hardly makes sense to him, how his boyfriend could talk all day to people who weren't him, and never to him. 

"He was telling the parents of the kids who died the bad news," Monty fills in.  

Bryan huffs out a hard breath and nods, gaze falling to his feet. "Sounds like Nate." Then he tilts his head back again, up to the dark upper stories of the ship, and Monty just nods. 

"There won't be anything up there," he says, "but go ahead." 

The second-floor haunts him worse than the first because it's where his seat was, when they came down, and because it's where they put Jasper's body, laid out sickly pale on the sorriest of makeshift mattresses, Monty's jacket on top of him to keep him warm, through the long hours when they didn't think he'd make it through. Monty leans against the wall in the same place he'd once strapped himself in and hoped he wouldn't die, and doesn't tell Bryan any of this, biting his tongue to keep down the words. 

He expects that Bryan will take his time looking around this floor too, examining the dents in the wall and the scuff marks in the floor, but he doesn't. He passes his hand briefly across one of the support columns, slides his fingers into the dents where one of the video screens used to be, then just wanders into the center of the room, unmoored and lost. He lifts his arms and lets them drop against his thighs. "You know, it's—" he starts. His back is to Monty, head tilted slightly to the side. "It's not what I thought it would be like." 

Monty shrugs, his own arms crossed tight, defensive, against his chest. "What were you expecting? It's just a big old hunk of metal. They didn't send us down in anything fancy." 

"That's not what I mean." He turns around, expression contorted with the words he can't quite find. "Not the ship. The—being in the ship. I thought maybe if I saw it, I'd know...sort of what it was like." 

Monty wants to tell him that this is a ridiculous notion, but if sharp, unwieldy anger flashes through him, it isn't really Bryan's fault. It's his own, because there's a note of something lost and pathetic in the other boy's tone, and it’s so _familiar_ that Monty has to tilt his head forward and close his eyes for a moment to force the echo of that yearning back.  

Bryan is still talking and there's no way to ask him to just _stop_. "I used to try to imagine it when I visited Nate in the Skybox, too. What it was like to live there. He never really wanted to talk about it. He only wanted to talk about how things used to be, and what it would be like when he got out." 

Never _if_ , Monty notes, only _when_. But of course, it's Miller, who's never shed any tears on bad probabilities. He's never struck Monty as someone who looks backwards either, which probably means the Skybox was really hell for him, a hell he didn’t want to talk about and make real. 

"Well it wasn't any fun," he says now, stone faced, and looks up again when Bryan laughs. The sound is humorless and short, just a _ha_ banging about in the cramped space, but jarring.  

"No," he agrees. "I figured it wasn't." 

He circles back to the wall, all the way at the far end of the room where he will be almost totally hidden in shadow, and sinks down against the floor with his knees up to his chest, arms looped loosely around them. "I'm sorry I dragged you here," he says. A raw undercurrent to his voice makes the words sound hoarse at their edges. "For nothing, I guess." 

"No.” Monty lets the word out on a sigh, then lets his legs bend, taking him down to the floor slowly. He slides them out in front of him and stares at his feet, so he can pretend he doesn't notice Bryan staring at him. "It's not nothing. It... makes a difference, being able to see it." 

Bryan doesn't answer for a while and the silence starts to feel claustrophobic, the rising heat suffocating. He starts to regret, perhaps, saying anything. Objectively, he probably should have kept quiet. His honesty was out of nowhere, connected to nothing, built on nothing; he and Bryan don't even know each other, really, other than in passing, other than just a little bit, the way people who grew up together on the same station inevitably do. Even the one time they met at the Unity Day dance doesn't feel, in retrospect, as intimate as this, as talking in quiet voices on the abandoned dropship's second floor. 

Maybe, Monty thinks, Bryan doesn't recognize just what he was confessing, or how hard it was to say. 

He tries again, tries not to sound stilted as he dredges up the words. "We—never get to visit the places we've left behind." 

"Because the Ark's gone," Bryan answers, not quite a question, and Monty nods. 

"I think about it," he admits.  

"About the Ark?" 

"About Farm Station." He's trying to put something strong into the backbone of his words, and he even looks up, wanting to make out Bryan's face in the gloom. "It's stupid because it's not like... it's not like I'd rather still be in space." He spent too many years trying to imagine Earth, fantasizing about Earth, drawing image after image of Earth again and again in his mind, just like everyone else he knew, to ever wish to be floating up in that bleak eternal darkness again. "But I'll never see it again. I'll never see my old quarters or the window on our observation deck, or the fields or—any of it." 

Too many words. Too many words; he can't stop talking. It's embarrassing to admit that he's so haunted by walls and windows and furniture and their tiny little bit of dirt and green, when he has Arkadia—made up of old Ark scrap anyway—planted here in the middle of real Earth and towering trees and leaves and plants he'd only ever read about before, ages ago now, on impersonal screens of haunting blue light. 

“Do you really miss Farm?” Bryan asks. The spaces between sentences seem unnaturally long and Monty himself feels frozen through them. “Or do you miss your dad?” 

Miller’s ex has real balls, Monty thinks, to mention his father. But then again, he is one of the ghosts haunting the room. 

“What did your mother tell you about—” 

“Almost nothing.” He cuts Bryan off with his own clipped words, swallows them down hoping to wash away the lump growing in his throat. “Just that he died—right after you crashed. Trying to save the kids.” 

“He died a hero,” Bryan says, with hard, combative certainty, but the words slide right off Monty like rain droplets across tarp, meaningless. 

“But he still died.” 

He still died; he’s still dead; he’s still gone. Leaving Monty and his mother eating dinner across the table from each other in the Arkadia commons. She talks about politics and war and strategy while he thinks about the taste of meat in his mouth and the way his back teeth grind down on it and the new parts of his tongue he never knew existed, before he came to the ground. His father probably never got to eat of the Earth. His father, third generation Farm Station, who spent his whole life coaxing green from transplanted space dirt, saw only a few hours’ worth of snow. 

Monty grits his teeth and swallows down bile. 

“I’m sorry,” Bryan says, into the silence that follows, but the ship devours the words before Monty can hear them.  

“Did you bury him?” he asks. The metal walls and hard gray floor want to take these syllables too, but they eke out just barely into the air. The floor returns instead the scrape of sole against steel as Monty pulls one knee up against his chest. His body feels clunky, like it’s made of metal too. Or like he’s left it behind somewhere, lost it in the distances of a place he’s never been, and now he has to pull it back to the present, piece by piece. He’s picturing rolling white hills and frigid white softness. It's hazy, though, little more than a dream. 

Bryan shakes his head. “We set the bodies on fire. The ground was frozen. We didn’t know what else to do.” 

The Grounders burn their bodies too; that’s what Monty’s heard. That’s why Finn is ashes, scattered in a rough pile among the new grass, blown away somewhere by the wind. It must smell terrible to burn a body, a nauseating potion of human flesh and flame.  

“What did you do with the ashes?” 

He looks up, just lifts his gaze up but keeps his head downturned, enough to see Bryan wave his fingers out and down again, a gesture of uncertainty. Then he raises his shoulders in a little shrug. “Let the wind blow them away. We couldn’t stay outside long.” He dips his gaze, too, runs his hands now down the outside of his legs like he’s not sure where his body is, either, like he needs to assure himself of it again. “We didn’t know what was going to happen.” 

Monty lets his eyes close but it’s not enough so he shuts them tighter, blocks out even the gray light and shadow of the dropship, pretends Bryan isn’t there with him and he’s alone. At first, he tries not to picture it. Then, he tries his best to. He aches to see the image there beneath his lids: an uncountable number of ashes swept away by an icy wind.  

“Do you know where it is?” 

“Where what is?” 

“The station. Where it landed. Could you go back there again?” 

Bryan hesitates. Monty hears it not only in the silence, but in the tone of his voice when he says, finally, “I don’t know. Maybe. But you’d have to be suicidal to want to go into Ice Nation territory.” 

When Monty opens his eyes again, Bryan is staring at him. Maybe he thinks Monty _is_ suicidal. Maybe that is worry there, in his forehead, between his eyes, or just sheer incomprehension: the fear of being locked in this old ship, far from home, with a mad man. Maybe he doesn’t understand that it wasn’t a suggestion, or even a wish. Just something that Monty needed, for a second, to know. 

If the whole Earth can be reduced to a map, like the atlas pages in the Ark library database, and lines drawn between any two points on that Earth, and if Bryan knows the point where Monty’s father's body hit the ground, then Monty can imagine bringing himself there. He can imagine himself traveling over tree routes and down forest paths, between mountains, tramping paths across the snow, until he's picturing himself there, in what seems now an immeasurably distant otherworld, living the echo of his father's life, seeing with his own eyes what his father saw in his last moments, becoming in this way closer to him than he ever was or could have been in that artificial, inhuman, stifling station floating up there in the darkness of space. 

He could just as easily be asking Bryan, not the coordinates of their landing site but: what was the exact temperature when you stepped outside; in what direction was the wind blowing; how tall were the mountains, and at what distance was the closest one that you could see; how deep was the snow. None of these details will collapse space or time or turn back any clock but maybe if he plugs them all into his mind, like numbers in a database, like points on a graph, keystrokes on a computer and a string of code, he'll be able to spit out some sort of answer for himself. Hard as data, clear as pixels on a screen. Somehow it will all become clear. 

“I know,” Monty answers, finally, and he tries not to sound defensive, but can’t control the tone of his voice. It is immeasurably frustrating, being misunderstood. “I just want to know how far away it is.” 

Bryan should understand this. He's the one who wanted to come to the dropship, the old campsite, and see where Miller used to live, to bridge a gap that seems immeasurably wide and deep. What is the use of walking on abandoned ground or running one's fingers over fading messages or climbing up a ladder that no one will ever need to use again? What does it help? Maybe nothing, or maybe it's enough to ease that floating, unmoored feeling that constantly unsettles those without a home. 

Maybe. 

Bryan watches him for a long time, until finally something in his expression settles, understanding coming to him at last, and he drops his hands down to the floor and shrugs and says, "Not that far. Not as far away as it seems." 

It seems another world away entirely, probably to them both. Monty just nods. 

"Is the station still in one piece?" he asks. 

"Pretty much." Bryan shifts where he's sitting, rearranges his limbs, like for all that Monty is grasping for any detail of this scene, he is trying just as hard to push it away. "I mean—nothing works anymore. But it didn't break apart when it landed." 

It aches more to think of his old quarters out there somewhere, the furniture shifted maybe or on its side, but far from wreckage, out there for him to find again and set to right, than to imagine Farm as no more than chunks of debris on the rocks, or sunk somewhere in the ocean, or crashed to bits and pieces on a mountain peak. Or whatever happened to the other stations, the ones they never found. It shouldn't hurt; it shouldn't matter. But it does and, like Bryan, he starts to pull away.

He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again and half-smiles. "I want to know everything but—" 

"But there's a reason your mom doesn't want to talk about it," Bryan finishes. He takes a long look around them, bites down on a sigh. "I know what you mean." 

The reason his mom won't bring it up is that she can't imagine crying in front of him again, or seeing him cry, but Monty doesn't say so. If they keep talking, they might start talking of regret. He just can't stand that. 

The ship has started to feel too small and too hot, and a wave of nausea like claustrophobia begins to rise up in his throat. He holds it down. The dropship is his past and his only and he knows without thinking through it in so many words that he won't ever see it again. But it's only a shell now, anyway. A giant gravestone marker to a dead time. He doesn't need to climb up into it and huddle there to remember every moment here that's mattered, and there's something both frightening and comforting in that. The more time passes, the greater the chasm between what he still holds brightest in his memory and the physical space itself, so that if he came again, he's not sure he'd even recognize the dirt where he used to sleep or the plants he used to eat or even the ship itself, the monument of his people to the ages. 

Realizing this, letting it seep into him like rain into parched earth, makes Farm Station feel an infinite number of eons farther away: a place he'll never reach, even if he one day does find himself kneeling at the spot where the flames took his father's body to the air. 

He drops his head back against the wall and looks up, up toward the ceiling and the third floor above. He can wait. They came here for Bryan. They'll stay as long as he needs to stay, as long as he needs for his own realizations to come. 

They don't speak again until after they've left the dropship, jumping off again into the clearing without a second glance behind. Monty leads the way around the back so he can close the main door. They'll leave everything as pristine and undisturbed as they found it. 

"Monty?" Bryan asks, then. His voice is uncertain but not quiet, loud enough for Monty to hear him even over the clunk and creak of the door rising up.  

"Yeah?" 

They stand back to watch the ship closing itself up again. It looks tired and worn, more than ready for years, decades, centuries of sleep. 

"Do you wish you'd come down in Farm Station with the rest of us?" 

Hard words rush him, and he shoots back, “What? Why are you asking?”—offended that Bryan has intruded so deftly into the privacy of his thoughts. 

Bryan sticks his hands in his pockets, and looks down at the ground as he starts walking toward the clearing's edge. "Because you were asking questions about it." 

"And you wanted to come all the way out here to see this ship," Monty counters. "Do you wish you'd been arrested for something?" 

"Maybe." 

Halfway through the old campsite, Monty catches up, then pulls ahead, so he's the first to step into the shadow of the trees. He's not actually angry, not quite—it's something else—but a hard energy animates him, and he shoves hanging branches roughly out of his way.  

What it is, is that Bryan barely knows him. But maybe after today he knows too much. Or maybe he just seems to, because he knows something about himself, something he sees mirrored in Monty, something Monty doesn't yet want to name. 

"No," he says, after a pause so long that Bryan’s question has all but faded from the air. But it's the truth and if he doesn't speak it, he'll never know it truly even within himself. "No. If I hadn't been here, most of my friends would probably be dead. All of them would have been."  

He won't explain what he did, not sure if Bryan knows or what Miller's told him in the privacy of the room they used to share, but it isn't guilt or regret that keeps his shoulders square and his eyes focused straight ahead. He did what he had to do. He'd do it again. Unspoken accusation, ghost whispers of anger and blame always at his back, that's what makes his jaw clench tight.  

Bryan doesn't question him.  

Maybe he thinks Monty's just bragging. 

Really he's just coming to acknowledge a little bit more of the truth. 

He wrote that code, the last code of his life, because he needed to, because if he hadn't, all of his friends would have been tortured one by one and thrown away. But that's the cold, hard calculation of it. The warm core of emotion, the engine that drove him, the bit of truth that made everything so simple and clear and that has given him simplicity and clarity ever since, is that Jasper was already down. Captured, cuffed. Beyond rescue in any other way. 

And if Monty had never made it to Mount Weather, had never lived in the dropship camp, had never spent months in the Sky Box, had never been arrested for something so incalculably dumb, then Jasper would have come down on Tesla, as Monty was coming down in Farm. And he would have crashed on the rocks or been buried in the sea or been torn apart on distant mountain peaks—lost somewhere out there in the unknown, not even the punctured hope of loss to bring some bit of closure. 

That is an impossible, an unbearable thought. 

"Forget about them," Bryan answers. He almost falls down a sudden dip in the ground, but catches his footing and ends up half-running down the incline, until he's an angry voice right in Monty's ear. "I wasn't asking about that, about consequences or whatever. I meant—just thinking about you. Do you wish you'd come down with us?" He sounds like someone who's long ago decided that the only one he can count on is himself. 

The ground evens out and Monty lets out a hard breath; he watches the way their boots tramp into and out of the patterns of sun and dirt and leaves.  

"No," he says again. "I don't."  

"Because you sounded sort of like you did, back there." 

He just hums back. A knot of words tangles up somewhere between his brain and his mouth. Eventually he forces out a few. "Yeah, I've thought about it." 

Bryan is watching him instead of the ground, trusting his feet against the roots and stones and trees, so stubbornly certain on a path he barely knows.  

"Obviously I've thought about it," Monty says again. "I could have had, you know, more time with my dad." 

_Sitting on his dad's shoulders, searching out the horizon of an endless field of green. His dad's hands gripping his ankles so he won't fall—_

“Yeah.” 

"And maybe things with my mom wouldn't be so..." 

"Awkward?"  

"Yeah." Awful. Unbearable. Like his lungs are constantly being squeezed inside his chest. "But it's not just that." 

It's still a decent walk back to Arkadia, and Bryan obviously can't stand the possibility that silence may fall between them again. He keeps searching, keeps poking at old unhealed wounds. 

"So what's the rest?" 

Monty huffs out a low breath through his nose. He lets himself get a few steps ahead, like he needs to sort out the path in front of them, like it's something so much more complicated than it is. He just can't have anyone next to him right now. He must exist in a bubble of his own invention, must pretend that the words of his tongue and teeth are just the echo of the thoughts in his head. 

"That I hate Arkadia," he says. And then, over the snap of a twig beneath his heel: "How did you imagine the ground when you were on the Ark? Did you imagine yourself coming down here after the bombs and fighting radiation or wandering around ruins? Or did you picture it like it must have been before?" 

"Like it was before," Bryan answers. 

"Me too. Like I was living a different life. That's how it always is, isn't it?" 

He pauses mid-step and grabs one of the leaves off a tree as he passes, not because he thinks it's edible (though maybe, five months ago, he would have just taken the chance), but because he wants to see it whole and green and perfect in the palm of his hand. 

"I don't understand," Bryan says. "How what always is?" 

"Wishing you were somewhere else. You wish hardest for a different life when you don't like the one you have." 

That's it; that's all he will say. Somehow Bryan must feel it in the air, Monty like a box folding in on itself, closing up, a door locking, an air lock sealing tight; he's said too much already anyway. He's given too much of himself away anyway.  

When he glances over to his left again, he notices that Bryan isn't watching him anymore, and somehow, this feels more obtrusive than if he were. 

Monty has never spent much time dissecting his happiness or his unhappiness. Those words, and the concepts beneath them, are too soft and too malleable, their meanings too imprecise and ever-shifting. Better to zoom in on problems, which are built up of undeniable facts, and simple like an endless binary of zeroes and ones. Better to focus with pinpoint precision on that which can be understood, analyzed, and changed. 

Other people wallow in feelings and fears and regrets. They let their unhappiness consume them like the waves of the ocean, crashing over them, pulling them under.  

Drowning is supposed to be an easy way to go. Your lungs fill with water and your consciousness blinks out. But to Monty it seems like a torturous, awful end: to be consumed by a vast unfolding sea; to feel nature itself, that was supposed to welcome you, consuming you and forcing you down.  

He's always thought himself far above all of that. Safe on the dry land, protected by his own strength. Fine because he has to be. Steady because he has to be. 

The silence stretches on until they catch sight of the wall that rings Arkadia, ugly and rusted, reaching up out of the dirt and toward the sky. Monty considers asking, now that their journey is done: _Was it worth it? Did you get what you wanted?_ But because he doesn't want the question pointed back at him, and because it doesn't really matter anyway, in the end, he keeps his mouth shut. 

"Ready to go back?" Bryan asks instead, just before they step out from the safety of the tree line, into the light. 

Not really. 

"Yeah," Monty answers, and nods. "I guess so. Let's go." 

* 

The sun is barely skimming through from underneath a layer of thin clouds, lending a twilight glow to mid-afternoon, when Monty grabs his towel and heads out to the showers. There's almost no one else around. Fear of rain, maybe, has warned them all indoors. The air still has the light warmth of spring—this, he's learning, is what spring feels like, a persistent undertone of green-scent everywhere—but an occasional hard breeze gives him chills. 

All he wants is to wash all of yesterday's old dirt from his skin. 

He turns the corner around one of the shakier out buildings and comes in sight of the showers and, at the same time, the first human being he's seen since stepping out the main Alpha Station door.  

Jasper's wrapped a towel around his waist and shoved his feet into his boots, and he looks ridiculous, hair and skin still wet from his shower, pale and skinny and vulnerable with his big clown shoes to anchor him. When he hears the crunch of Monty's heel, he looks up sharply. But if he's surprised, he doesn't let it show. He runs his hand over his face like he's trying to dry it off, trying to wipe away the drops of water clinging to his eyebrows and the tip of his nose. 

"Hey," he says, and raises one hand in a half-wave. 

"Hey," Monty answers. 

This doesn't mean they're talking. This doesn't mean he has anything else he wants to say. Still, he doesn't move and Jasper doesn't either, and the pale light filters through the clouds above them, shifting as the clouds shift, and when the breeze picks up again Jasper shivers with such violence that Monty can see his whole body shake with it. 

"Okay, well, I'm going inside," Jasper announces, and starts walking again. They have to pass each other—have to pass each other, or have to take some obvious, aggressive alternate route, some wide-angled fuck-you detour of avoidance. But they won’t, because their fight has long ago turned fossil-like and frozen, like volcanic rock. 

So Jasper passes him by, close enough to touch. Close enough for a moment for Monty to count the water droplets still on his skin. 

Only when Jasper's no longer in sight does he start walking again himself, swinging his towel over the side of the shower as he steps behind the partition and starts to get undressed. 

He's got one shoe off and one shoe on when he hears Jasper's voice calling him—"Hey, Monty!"—and he looks up. Just looks up and waits, still holding his shoe in his hand. 

"I just—" Jasper's voice falters, like he wasn't really expecting Monty to listen. He rubs his hand at the back of his neck, swipes his fingers up through his short hair. "I just want you to know, I'm still—I’m still in pieces." 

For a long moment, Monty has no idea what that means. So he doesn’t respond. All of his answers have bottlenecked anyway; he only wants to throw his shoe down and run over, limping on his uneven feet. But that is just as dramatic as it is impossible, because his body is frozen and the wheels of his mind are spinning, stuck in the mud and sputtering. 

"I'm still falling apart," Jasper adds. 

He waits, and then, when Monty gives no answer, starts to turn away. 

"You're not the only one," Monty calls after him, finally: words that aren't quite the truth, and aren't quite a lie. Jasper looks back at him, almost smiling this time. It's an expression Monty can't read: maybe sympathetic, maybe sad, maybe mocking—like he knows something that Monty never will. It's frustrating and annoying, and it's all, this time, that he will get. 

_Either you pull yourself together and get on with your life,_ Monty had told him, _or you fall apart alone_. 

The clouds slide together and block out the thin rays of sun, and Jasper calls back, "See you around," and keeps on walking. Monty watches him until he's turned the corner out of view, then finishes undressing, and steps finally beneath the shower spray. 

Arkadia in the endless afternoon is so unnaturally quiet, so unnaturally empty and still, that if he closes his eyes and listens to the water, cool as it splashes down around his feet, he can almost pretend that he's the very last person on Earth. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always GREATLY appreciated, especially on niche stories like this. 
> 
> I'm also on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/).


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